Soldiers of God Read online

  Hundreds of journalists covered the signing of the Geneva agreement. Close to a hundred more arrived in Kabul afterward to watch the start of the Soviet withdrawal on May 15, 1988, when the press began to speculate about the return of the five and a half million refugees.

  A month later, in Nangarhar province near the Pakistan border, I encountered a group of refugees ascending a mountain with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They asked me for water from my canteen, something Afghans rarely do unless they are ill. The refugees were not walking back to their homes in Afghanistan but leaving them. Soviet jets had bombed their village in the Kot Valley south of Jalalabad a few days earlier, killing thirty-four people. This was nothing unusual; since the start of their withdrawal, the Soviets had been bombing civilian areas around major cities in order to create free-fire zones where minefields could be extended and invading mujahidin units easily spotted. The Soviets were determined not to leave Afghanistan “clinging to helicopters,” like the Americans in Vietnam. Anyway, the idea of millions of refugees returning home while millions of mines littered the countryside was considered absurd by relief workers in Peshawar.

  None of this mattered, however. As soon as the Red Armywithdrawal commenced, even as the Soviets were still dropping mines and bombing villages, the press shifted elsewhere what limited attention it had bestowed on Afghanistan. (Only at the conclusion of the Soviet withdrawal, in February 1989, did the media tune in.) “Afghanistan is already being forgotten,” lamented Zia Rizvi, a top UN official involved in the refugee repatriation program. “The worst enemy of the Afghan refugees is the short memory of world public opinion.”

  Everybody in the West was at least aware of Afghanistan, and regarding the role of the Soviets, most people probably assumed the worst. But even for these people, the war was an opaque presence half a world away. It wasn’t felt with the immediacy of other news. Political conservatives in America believed the fault rested with the liberal media. There was certainly an element of truth in this, but less than was thought. And it wasn’t a revealing truth: liberals I knew cared deeply about this war and occasionally risked their lives to report it.

  Even from Peshawar, thirty-five miles from the Afghan border, the war was, in a visual sense, inaccessible. Television cameramen trekked for weeks on little food, only to return ill and half starved, with almost no footage that could compete against the heartbreaking backdrops of black townships in South Africa or the spectacle of a hijacked jumbo jet on the tarmac at a Mediterranean airport — images that people in the West could immediately relate to. Though a few journalists managed to get close to the fighting, the war was never brought close to the audience. Over a million were killed, but there were no images of epic battles, as there were in the Middle East, or of mass death, as in Ethiopia.

  There were major battles in Afghanistan, but the only way to get to them on short notice was to fly, which was impossible, since the only people with planes were the Communists. Instead, for nearly a decade, the public was shown the same monotonous film clips of smoke billowing in the distance and of bearded, turbaned guerrillas with old rifles sniping at convoys — images that only increased the war’s unreality.

  Afghanistan was too physically rough an assignment and offered too few rewards to draw the world’s best television cameramen. And it is the cameramen — not the high-profile correspondents — who hold the key to a television story’s impact. Had the very best cameramen traveled to the front lines, however, they would have been frustrated by the visual material they had to work with. The mujahidin were exotic all right, with their wide turbans, Lee-Enfield rifles, and great black beards. But the effect was static, flat. In Afghanistan, there was absolutely no clash between the strange and the familiar, which gave Vietnam and Lebanon their rock-video quality, with zonked-out GIs in headbands and rifle-wielding Shiite terrorists wearing Michael Jackson T-shirts.

  Afghanistan existed without bridges to the twentieth century. The country was mired in medievalism; a “mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers,” as Kipling noted; a place where terrible things always happened to people. The Soviets destroyed it — but didn’t the Mongols too! In the January 20, 1980, issue of the Village Voice, the left-wing writer Alexander Cockburn employed such a rationale to justify the Soviet invasion of the month before:

  We all have to go one day, but pray God let it not be over Afghanistan. An unspeakable country filled with unspeakable people, sheepshaggers and smugglers… I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it’s Afghanistan.

  Cockburn’s tone was, of course, politically motivated. But given the West’s tepid public response to the subsequent Soviet occupation, it appeared that many people, deep down inside, reacted to Afghanistan in similar terms.

  The images coming out of Afghanistan were simply beyond the grasp of the Western television audience. The Soviets had taken American tactics in Vietnam several steps further and fought a twenty-first-century war, a war that was completely impersonal and therefore too dangerous for journalists to cover properly, in which the only strategy was repeated aerial carpet bombings, terrorism, and the laying of millions of mines. The Hind helicopter gunship, the workhorse of the Soviet military in Afghanistan, packed no less than 128 rockets and four missiles. It was able to incinerate an entire village in a few seconds. Against such measures, the very concept of battle had become nearly obsolete.

  While the Soviets waged a twenty-first-century war, the Afghans fought a nineteenth-century one. The Afghans were able to survive and drive out the Soviets precisely, and only, because they were so primitive. High birth and infant mortality rates in an unforgiving mountain environment, where disease was rife and medical care absent, had seemed to accelerate the process of evolution in rural Afghanistan, making the inhabitants of the countryside — where most of the mujahidin came from — arguably the physically toughest people on earth. They could go long periods of time without food and water, and climb up and down mountains like goats. Keeping up with them on their treks and surviving on what they survived on reduced me and other Westerners to tears. They seemed an extension of an impossible landscape that had ground up one foreign invader after another.

  The mujahidin borrowed little from other modern guerrilla struggles. They had a small number of vehicles and, until the later stages of the war, few walkie-talkies, leaving the enemy without communications to intercept. Like the ancient Greeks, the mujahidin used runners to carry messages between outposts. Some areas of the country were blessed with exceptionally talented guerrilla commanders. But for the most part, the resistance fighters had no strategy to speak of, and their command structure was often so informal as to be nonexistent. A KhAD or KGB agent in their midst would have been hopelessly confused: there was nothing to infiltrate, and no pattern — often no logic or planning — to guerrilla attacks. Predicting the mujahidin’s actions was like forecasting the wind direction. In Peshawar, it was said that their very incompetence helped to defeat the Soviets (though after the Soviets departed, the complete disorganization of the resistance hindered its efforts to capture major Afghan cities still held by the Afghan Communists).

  The mujahidin were a movement without rhetoric or ideology or a supreme leader — they had no Arafat or Savimbi or Mao. Their Moslem fundamentalism lacked political meaning because Afghanistan, unlike the Arab world and Iran, never had an invasion of Western culture and technology to revolt against. The guerrillas had no complexes, no chips on their shoulders regarding the modern world, since they had never clashed with it until the Soviets came. Religion for them was inseparable from the other certainties of a harsh and lonely mountain existence. In sum, the mujahidin had no politics; therefore, with few exceptions, they could not be extremists. Concepts like “the Third World” and “national liberation” had absolutely no meaning for them. After a trip to Paktia province in November 1987, William McGurn wrote in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal that th
e Afghan guerrillas were “simply ornery mountain folk who have not cottoned to a foreign power that has seized their land, killed their people and attacked their faith.”

  If the mujahidin resembled anyone, it was the early-nineteenth-century Greek klephts, who with foreign help liberated their country from Ottoman Turkish occupation. Like the Afghans, the Greeks then were an unruly hodgepodge of guerrilla bands driven by a fervid religious faith (in their case, Orthodox Christianity). They were at a stage of development similar to that of Afghan peasants today: they lived an austere life in the mountains, were riven by blood feuds, and never forgot an insult. Lord Byron and the other foreign eccentrics who flocked to Greece in the 1820s to assist the rebels might have felt at home among the relief workers and journalists in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

  The Afghans were able to withstand a late-twentieth-century military onslaught by relying on nineteenth-century values and methods. In The Face of Battle, John Keegan observed: “Impersonality, coercion, deliberate cruelty, all deployed on a rising scale, makes the fitness of modern man to sustain the stress of battle increasingly doubtful.” There is an awful lesson here: even conventional warfare is now so horrible that only the values of the past may make victory possible. And in Afghanistan, the lack of all-weather roads and a national press left the Afghans only the values of the past to fall back on, inward-oriented village codes that were undiluted by the rationalism that pervades not just the West but the more technologically developed parts of the Third World.

  The Soviets killed a larger percentage of Afghans than the Nazis killed Soviets in World War II. Were Americans or Europeans to suffer the same level of mass violence today, it is questionable whether they would fight back as the Afghans have. More likely, they would seek some sort of compromise with their occupier.

  The Afghan mujahidin, numbering over 100,000, were the first group of insurgents to drive out a Russian army since Czar Peter the Great began his empire’s southward expansion three hundred years ago. The mujahidin were attacked with more firepower than any Moslem group in the Middle East could imagine, yet almost never did they resort to terrorism. Though the guerrillas were responsible for political assassinations, the brutal treatment of enemy soldiers, and rocket attacks in Kabul and other cities that killed civilians, to my knowledge or that of any journalist I know, groups of Soviet or Afghan civilians were never deliberately singled out as targets. Because the mujahidin were innocent of the modern trait of terrorism, they did not inspire the horror and fascination of the car bombers and airplane hijackers, with their black hoods and nihilistic beliefs. The mujahidin, despite their many accomplishments, were not traditionally good subject matter for the media: they were neither complicated nor fanatical. They were the most understated of resistance fighters, and so, after a decade of war, they still had no face.

  What the television images did not translate was that despite their apparent primitiveness, as individuals the mujahidin were easy for a foreigner to talk to and befriend. There was none of the stiffness and forced probing that characterized relationships between Moslems and Westerners elsewhere. Because they had never been colonized, the Afghans didn’t have the fears and prejudices toward the West with which other peoples in the Orient are burdened. “After the lowering fanaticism of Meshed [in Iran],” wrote Bruce Chatwin, crossing into the mountains of Afghanistan “was like coming up for air.” In The Road to Oxiana, the 1937 classic considered the Ulysses of twentieth-century travel writing, Robert Byron, having just arrived from the Middle East, exclaimed about Afghanistan: “Here at last is Asia without an inferiority complex.” The Afghans seemed wonderfully straightforward, and journalists and relief workers took to them because in them we saw a stronger, more heroic version of ourselves.

  Sympathizing with guerrilla movements is an occupational hazard of foreign correspondents everywhere, but the Afghans were the first guerrillas whom journalists not only sympathized with but actually looked up to. As romantic and unprofessional as this was, we were not the first Westerners to fall under the spell. Generation after generation of British colonial officials who had fought the Afghans in defense of the Northwest Frontier of British India had learned to admire and identify with their foes. Mountstuart Elphinstone, who led a mission to the court of Afghan ruler Shah Shuja in 1809, noted that the Afghans “have not that indifference to truth, and that style of habitual and gratuitous falsehoods, which astonishes a European… in India and Persia.” Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British governor of the Northwest Frontier, wrote, “For the stranger who had eyes to see and ears to hear,… here was a people who looked him in the face and made him feel he had come home.”

  The British invaded Afghanistan three times, and on each occasion they were driven out. Out of an invasion force of 4,500 that retreated from Kabul in January 1842, only one man was left alive. Never had the British met such a formidable adversary. This forced them to meet the Afghans on an equal plane without a trace of condescension.

  Kipling paid the ultimate tribute to the Afghans in “The Ballad of East and West.” Because of its simple truth and catchy rhythm, the poem’s first line, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet/‘has become a cliché. But read in its entirety, the ninety-six-line epic tells the story of how a friendship is forged between the son of a British colonel and an Afghan brigand named Kamal, whom the colonel’s son was sent to capture.

  They have looked each other between the eyes, and there they found no fault.

  They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on leavened bread and salt:

  They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on fire and fresh-cut sod,

  On the hilt and haft of the Khyber knife, and the Wondrous Names of God.

  Kipling, whose imperialism is often misunderstood by modern readers, ends the story with this uplifting truth:

  …there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

  When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

  The poem, which was published in 1889, captures the spirit of the naive and idealized friendships that existed one hundred years later between mujahidin commanders and some extremely brave journalists and relief workers whom I knew in Peshawar.

  Kamal, the hero of Kipling’s poem, was more than just an Afghan. He was a Pathan (pronounced “pah-tahn”), as were most of the mujahidin and the Afghans whom the British encountered on the Northwest Frontier. The Pathans are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan (one of every two Afghans is a Pathan) and the largest existent tribal society in the world. They live by a medieval code of honor called Pukhtunwali and have given the country all of its kings and polical leaders. Until recent decades, in fact, “Pathan” and “Afghan” have been synonymous. The Pathans inhabit a huge arc of territory in the eastern, southern, and southwestern part of Afghanistan. They speak Pukhtu, an Aryan tongue that borrows much from Persian and Hindustani, and employs Arabic script. R. T. I. Ridgway, an officer in the British colonial service, described Pukhtu as “a stong virile language, capable of expressing ideas with neatness and accuracy.” Actually, the Pathans prefer to call themselves Pukhtuns, or Pushtuns if they live in southern Afghanistan, where their accent is softer. But the name Pathan, first used by the Indians to describe the Afghans on the Northwest Frontier, has become commonly accepted.

  The origins of the Pathans are shrouded in myth. By various accounts, they are descended from the ancient Hebrews, from an Aryan race called the White Huns, and from the Greek troops of Alexander the Great who passed through Afghanistan in the fourth century B.C. Pathan genealogies read like tracts from the Old Testament. According to one legend, the Pathans are descendants of Afghana, a grandson of the Israelite king Saul, whose ancestors were carried away from Palestine by Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, and planted as colonists in Persia, from where they migrated eastward to present-day Afghanistan. The name Afghana cannot be found in the Hebrew Bible, but many Pathans still believe the sto
ry. Even more believe themselves to be Aryans, but all will admit that they are not certain of their own ancestry.

  Almost every one of Afghanistan’s twenty-odd ethnic groups took part in the struggle against the Soviets, but it was the Pathans who gave the resistance its mythic, larger-than-life quality, its lack of political pretensions, and its chivalry — as well as its primitiveness, tribal disorder, and recklessness. Only Pathans could have invented a game that requires a man to pick up a butterfly mine and toss it in the air without losing a hand (not all succeeded). Only Pathans could make walking through a minefield a test of manhood.

  The Pathans are a purer, crystallized version of everything that is good and bad in the Afghan character. More than any other single factor, it was their harsh and unforgiving tribal culture, free of subtleties and introspection and unaffected by the modern world, that defeated the mines and other weapons of the Soviet invaders. As the seventeenth-century Pathan poet Khushal Khan Khatak wrote:

  The very name Pukhtun spells honor and glory,

  Lacking that honor, what is the Afghan story?

  1

  Frontier Town

  THE CEILING FAN rattled like an airplane propeller in the breathless, mud-baked heat of the room, blowing new, crisp 100-afghani notes all over the floor. The money changer in the Peshawar bazaar had handed me the notes in heaps of 10,000. The afghani was devaluing fast. For years already, in one of the CIA’s most successful covert operations, millions of counterfeit afghanis had been printed in order to wreck the Kabul regime’s economy and allow the mujahidin to buy weapons and ammunition on the open market on the Northwest Frontier. But the CIA program wasn’t good enough for the KGB. Near the end of the war the Soviets, needing to handcuff the Afghan economy to their own in the wake of a troop withdrawal, started buying up vast amounts of U.S. dollars on the black market in Kabul, driving down the afghani further in order to make Western products prohibitively expensive for the Afghan population. So there I sat, sweating on a sagging jute bed with a draft at my back, stuffing stacks of possibly counterfeit money into my rucksack, just to pay for a mule in case I got sick.